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Of original team of 9, 7 now confirmed to join DSK: Singh, Pai, Chandrasekhar, Chadha, Khard (l to r)

After our exclusive report on Monday that up to nine partners would bulk-move from HSA Advocates to DSK Legal, the latter has now confirmed the hiring of HSA Advocates senior partners Anjan Dasgupta and Aparajit Bhattacharya, alongside only five others, including one Bangalore partner.

The originally departing team was to include Dasgupta, Bhattacharya and seven other partners, making up a total of up to 29 fee-earners.

However, it now appears that HSA has managed to retain two partners in that group: finance and projects partner Harsh Arora and associate partner Akshay Malhotra have decided not to join DSK.

It is understood that up to around 20 fee-earners could end up joining DSK from HSA in total.

We have reached out to HSA founding partner Hemant Sahai for comment.

The five other partners, including two associate partners, to join DSK are:

Aninda Pal (partner, Mumbai): M&A, PE/VC and corporate commercial, regulatory advisory. He had joined HSA from JurisCorp in 2016. He is a 2005 Symbiosis Law School Pune graduate.

Sharath Chandrasekhar (partner, Bengaluru): private equity, M&A and corporate commercial. Had joined HSA in 2016, after having set up local boutique law firm Citius Law Partners. He is a 2005 NLSIU Bangalore graduate.

Referring to Chandrasekhar, DSK stated that “This move has also enabled us to restart our office in Bengaluru, which will help serve our clients there better”.

DSK said in its press release: “These teams include seven partners and add significantly to our projects and project finance practices, making these amongst the strongest in the country, and significantly expand our corporate and M&A practices.

“The partnership at DSK will also benefit from the vast experience of these partners not only in the various practice areas they specialize in, but also on aspects relating to firm management.”

DSK Legal will grow to 32 partners and 130 fee-earners with this bulk hire.

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When u publish a news story facts and language both are integral to it. While you may or may not have got all the facts in place, that's upto you to check. The language is sacrosanct to the news as well. Using words like defector in your headline shows a low level of journalism. They aren't the first to move teams. Hemant may call them by names, he must be hurt for sure but the person who wrote this headline seems to bias towards HSA's sentiment.

"a person who leaves his or her own country or group to join an opposing one"

Obviously we used it as a slightly tongue in cheek metaphor, rather than literally talking about countries, but a team move like that can fairly be described as a defection to an opposing / rival firm, without implying any wrongdoing.

Of course, at the end of the day, none of this is literally war or life and death spycraft, and I agree it's a dramatic word to use, but otherwise we'd just be using the same boring words all the time, and where's the fun in that (for readers as well as us)?

Though let me ask you this: would you think defection could have been appropriate to have used during the CAM/SAM split heydey, for a high calibre team move between the firms?